Social marketing vs publishing -- funny!

In the New Yorker's "Shouts and Murmurs," Ellis Weiner writes up a pitch-perfect parody of a certain kind of manic social-media-expert publishing marketdroid (thankfully, not any of the absolutely wonderful marketing people at my publishers are like this!):

To start: Do you blog? If not, get in touch with Kris and Christopher from our online department, although at this point I think only Christopher is left. I'll be out of the office from tomorrow until Monday, but when I get back I'll ask him if he spoke to you. We use CopyBuoy via Hoster Broaster, because it streams really easily into a Plaxo/LinkedIn yak-fest meld. When you register, click "Endless," and under "Contacts" just list everyone you've ever met. It would be great if you could post at least six hundred words every day until further notice.

If you already have a blog, make sure you spray-feed your URL in niblets open-face to the skein. We like Reddit bites (they're better than Delicious), because they max out the wiki snarls of RSS feeds, which means less jamming at the Google scaffold. Then just Digg your uploads in a viral spiral to your social networks via an FB/MS interlink torrent. You may have gotten the blast e-mail from Jason Zepp, your acquiring editor, saying that people who do this sort of thing will go to Hell, but just ignore it.

Subject: Our Marketing Plan (via Making Light)

[gollux October 16, 2009 10:35 PM]

Errff! Sorry, gagged a little. Sounds like a SEM we just turned down. He was getting pretty desperate and the more he talked, the less sense he made. Shades of the great internet bubble burst all over again. Lots of words, no business plan...

[Zadaz October 17, 2009 12:44 AM]

This is a joke? This is considerably less rabid and buzzword-bingo-y than several conversations I've heard in the last month. It's consistently given by a kid with spiky hair and an ironic goatee who was in Jr. High when the dot-bomb happened. He's jacked out on caffeine (at least) and leans uncomfortably close to you when talking except when he leans back to check his iPhone under the table. And under no circumstances will his audience be given any chance to speak.

Unfortunately he's usually taking to kids equally as young to whom this is all ridiculously exciting, rather than merely ridiculous.

Wonder if they have any spare VC for my smell printer or my online grocery store, or my online pet store, or this barcode scanner that I'll give away...

[ChibiR October 17, 2009 2:22 AM]

*rubs temples* What did we do wrong to deserve such a buzzword barrage, Cory...?

[Teresa Nielsen Hayden October 17, 2009 6:59 AM]

I love this piece because it sounds exactly like real explanations of stuff I'm not yet familiar with, and because Ellis Weiner does great verbs, and because the last paragraph is perfect.

[gollux October 17, 2009 9:47 AM]

As "The Register" puts it, Weborrhea 2.0... Get your hip waders on...

[timolloyd October 17, 2009 12:11 PM]

Seriously, its this kind of misrepresentation that is preventing more organisations from embracing web 2.0

[Anonymous October 17, 2009 2:15 PM]

reminds me of the Bill Hicks routine:
"Oh, you know what Bill's doing? He's going for that anti-marketing dollar. That's a good market, he's very smart."

[fnc October 17, 2009 5:02 PM]

For some reason, reading that made me hungry for stir fry.

[sonipitts October 17, 2009 7:14 PM]

Sounds like the guy in this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKCdexz5RQ8

[gollux replied to comment from sonipitts October 17, 2009 7:27 PM]

Now, if only we can figure out how to spend hit spikes...

And the part about doing it all yourself while he runs off and spends your cash never to be seen again...

I think I just dodged a bullet, hopefully my manager wasn't impressed.

[Anonymous October 18, 2009 1:32 AM]

Guess I'm lucky not to find this funny. In that I live in Oregon, have never met anybody like this, could never meet anybody like this. As somebody who was excited about the Web as a new medium in the mid-'90s, at this point I feel like an idiot. It's the Trepanation Superhighway as far as I'm concerned. I'd probably get rid of my computer and be done with it if my neighborhood wasn't so goddamn boring at night.

[Felix Mitchell October 19, 2009 5:40 AM]

Well I like the parts that aren't just a list of made up names.

[Anonymous October 19, 2009 7:12 AM]

RAP actually seems cool. oh well only a joke.

[Anonymous October 19, 2009 11:43 PM]

Anyone who reads this as an attack on social media and not on the sad state of the publishing industry hasn't been involved in a book in the last year. What's significant isn't the list of buzzwords, but the expectation that it's the author's, not the publisher's, responsibility to handle all promotion.

The key lines are this:

"Once we get back from Frankfurt, we’d like to see you on morning talk shows like the 'Today' show and 'The View,' so please get yourself booked on them and keep us 'in the loop.' If I’m not here—which I won’t be, since after the book fair I go on vacation for two weeks—just tell Jenni, my assistant, when she gets back from jury duty."

And this:

"I’ve attached a list of celebrities we think would be great to blurb your book, so find out their numbers and call them up."

Times are tough all over, but we're in an era when there is no real promotion department at most publishers. They only put any effort into books whose advances they over-pay for.

And, I swear to God, my editor got fired the day after our book was finally delivered to the printing press. Reading this was like going back to an uglier time about 9 months ago...